problems with need for speed underground

ha anyone else not been able to play this online? i go to the play online option, opens up internet explorer, i click on the green button, and then it tells me that it doesn't need a patch, but won't let me online to play anyway... and continues to say i need a patch... that isn't required... what the hell???

-A big deal was made about the fact that Underground was going to have "revolutionary" body damage and physics. It does not.

-No Lan Play

-AA works very bad if it all

-No LAN play and limited multiplayer options. After all these years, not one single racing game has captured the simple fun of Midtown Madness. Cops & Robbers / Grab the Gold were the most fun racing multiplayer styles I haver ever played (There is a city and randomly in the city a floating bar of gold is place. Depending on the server setup, the bar of gold could have no weight or be very heavy to the car. You touch the gold and you have it. The player with the gold shows up on RADAR and they have to try to make it to a "base" to deposit the gold for points. Raming the gold carying vehicle hard enough would make that vehicle drop the gold so that anyone could pick it up, and you could pass gold to a teammate if their car was close to yours... amazingly fun stlye of multiplay for a racing game).

Okay I played this with my friends a couple of days ago. I love the handling, it is tight enough to be challenging, yet loose enough to make it fun. We had a little elimination tournament thing, and guess who won?

I'm definitely not a regular gamer...I just like the NFS series and some flight/space sims like Decent Freespace 2 etc.
But this game seriously had me hooked for a while. Now I've taken the CDs and hidden them from my sight so that I don't get distracted just before finals.